


Tacet

by equestrianstatue



Series: Tacet [1]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, M/M, Parenting Challenges, Period-Typical Homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-02
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-25 19:59:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13841943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: “It’s a pattern,” Thursday said, at last. “You’re the one who should be able to see that. Can’t tell me I should be ignoring a pattern.”*Slight AU. Thursday comes back to the party.





	Tacet

**Author's Note:**

> Set during episode 3x01, Ride.

It was a shock, was all, and on top of a long day. Thursday wouldn’t have come by so late if he hadn’t been sat up so late to start with. It was well past midnight when he’d left Bixby’s place the first time, but he’d gone by the station to drop off the poker chip with the rest of the evidence. Only then he hadn’t gone home. Sat up going through the contents of Jeannie Hearne’s handbag again, instead. Reading through the file. Something stopping him from leaving, something in the back of his mind. A little voice. _There’s something we’re missing._ A familiar sort of voice, and all.

And Thursday had thought: not as if that party was winding down. Not as if they’d all be in bed by now. Not as if Win would still be up and about if he went home, either. So no harm in going back up to the lake and having another poke around. Anyhow, he felt like the drive.

Only he must have been sat up longer than he’d realised, because by the time he got to Bixby’s, it was quiet as the dead. Almost eerie. Only a few hours since, there’d been barely space to park for cars in the drive, the smoke of a hundred cigarettes in the air, music and shouted laughter spilling out into the night— but all gone now. Like he’d dreamt it. Except for that the front of the house was still floodlit, bone-white against the black of the sky and the trees and the lake, and that the huge front doors were still open. Thrown wide to the world, to the hundreds of people who’d vanished into the darkness. In case any of them should come back, Thursday supposed. But there was neither hide nor hair. Not much chance of being disturbed while he had a look round, then.

Thursday took a walk round the east side of the house. All right for some: grounds stretching out of sight, a whole showroom’s worth of cars out on display, bloody great fountain lit up like Blackpool. But not a soul to be seen. Bixby’s taste, all this, he wondered, or inherited? Thursday thought about having another word with him. _There’s something we’re missing._ Likely wasn’t in bed, yet, if all the lights were still on.

Back round to the front of the house, and through the open front doors. In the hallway, Thursday cleared his throat, by way of announcement, but it only echoed off the marble and wood-polish. So he went on through to the ballroom, which cradled the remains of the evening: coloured lights glinting off curtains of mirrored glass pieces, sprays of flowers and greenery, floor strewn with confetti and stray balloons. Funny, how quickly the life could drain from a place. Like the ghost of a party.

Bixby’s study was the obvious place to try. The door was closed, and Thursday knocked. “Mr Bixby?” Nothing. He knocked again, and then he tried the door: unlocked. As the grave in here, too— but he could smell the cigarette that had burnt out in the ashtray, and there were two empty glasses on the desk.

Thursday took a little time over the room, but turned up nothing he hadn’t seen the first time round. The dark wood panelling and the framed paintings on the walls: good, he supposed. The cigarettes in the dispenser and the Scotch in the decanter: good, he knew. The desk drawers were locked, and there were no papers, no notebooks, nothing like that, left out where they could be seen. Could be tidiness. Could be something to hide.

He went back to the ballroom. Not as if it was a crime scene: he couldn’t very well turn the whole place over. An itch wasn’t exactly grounds for a warrant. Time to give it up, then, until tomorrow, at least. 

Standing still, Thursday could feel a draught coming across the floor, and he followed it to the open French windows. Couldn’t see the back gardens from here, but there was a lawn leading to a little tangle of trees, with strings of lights draped among them and paper lanterns hanging from the branches. For the first time, Thursday thought he heard something. 

As he was crossing the lawn, he heard it again. The gentle murmur of voices. Bixby’s voice, two to one: he remembered the lilt of the man’s speech, refined, warm, polished. Bixby and his last remaining guest, then. In fact, Thursday could just about make out the shape of them, under the trees. 

It was Thursday’s gut that knew it, before his brain. Some part of him that could pick out Morse in the first pass at a scene, just the frame of him, without thinking. But then his brain caught up and made him look again. It was Morse, all right, but missing his usual posture: the stiff hunch of his shoulders, the hands shoved deep in his pockets. Instead, he looked to be leaning on the tree behind him. Relaxed, almost. The bright white of his shirt showing under his tux, his head turned in Bixby’s direction. They were close together. Morse was— smiling.

“On a night like this,” Thursday heard Bixby say, voice low, “a man might believe anything’s possible.” And he reached out with one hand, one finger slipping under the lapel of Morse’s dinner jacket, his thumb moving carefully over the material there. Morse raised his eyebrows. He didn’t flinch.

All of this, in a second. But Thursday had been near enough to hear it, to see it, which meant that the step he’d just taken was near enough to them, too. His tread was light, by trade, but he hadn’t been trying not to be heard. The crack of a twig under his feet was a thunderclap across the garden. Morse and Bixby both looked up.

Thursday took in the faint ripple of Bixby’s reaction: alarm, surprise, irritation, recognition. But Morse’s face flickered through all that and more, in double the time. He took a step away from Bixby, at once; his mouth twitched, half-open, his face pale in the lantern-light. For a moment, they all stood still.

Then Bixby, clearing his throat, stepped forward. “Detective Inspector. It’s awfully late.”

Thursday said, “Door was open.”

Bixby inclined his head in acknowledgement. “I don’t lock up until the party is over.”

Morse, meanwhile, had begun to look a lot more like Morse: that trick he had of curling in on himself even while standing up, the effort of not fidgeting from foot to foot etched into his stillness.

“This is Detective Inspector Thursday,” Bixby was saying, voice smooth, its lightness practised, “who visited us earlier this evening, and— ah.” He had turned towards Morse. “But of course. The second policeman. You know one another.”

At some length, Morse said, “Yes.”

“Then no introductions are necessary. As I was saying, Detective Inspector, I hoped I had answered all your questions quite fully a few hours ago. Is there anything else I can help you with?”

A good question. _There’s something we’re missing._ Well— yes. Thursday let out a breath. Not as if he’d had another line of enquiry. Only a hunch that another conversation might turn something up. Perhaps some idea that Bixby might be drunk, more likely to let something slip. But now, faced with Bixby’s measuredly polite expression, and Morse staring resolutely at the ground behind him, Thursday found he didn’t much care to ask questions.

“Actually, it was Constable Morse I was after,” he said.

Morse’s head jerked upwards, his eyes wide.

Thursday said, “A word?”

Morse opened his mouth, said nothing for a long second, and closed it. Then he coughed, straightened up, and said, “I was just about to leave, anyhow.”

Bixby had turned back to Morse. “Of course.” He smiled. “Well, goodnight, then, old man.”

Morse gave him a nod, hands firmly in his pockets, and began to make his way out of the trees.

“Oh— will you come and watch, tomorrow? When I go for the run?”

Morse stopped for a moment, and looked back. “Perhaps.”

“All right. Around two, if you’re coming.”

Morse nodded again. Then he turned away, and began to walk across the lawn.

“Goodnight, Mr Bixby,” said Thursday, and followed him.

There was no need to go back indoors. The gardens led them all the way around the side of the house, back to the sweep of the front drive, and it wasn’t until they got there that Morse stopped, and said, “Well?” 

 _A word_. Thursday didn’t, strictly, have one. “Run you back?” he asked, instead.

Morse shrugged, and shook his head. “It’s barely a walk.” 

It would be easy enough to get back into the car. Leave this behind, where it belonged, at the door of somebody else’s house. But Thursday said, “Come on then,” and set off down the drive. When he heard Morse’s tread on the gravel behind him, he slowed to let him catch up.

They turned onto the road at the end of the drive: wide, black and wet with the night’s rain. A smell of wet pine and mulch. The dark wall of trees rose up on either side, although off to the right the lake glinted through the gaps. Like walking into the mouth of some strange beast. 

Thursday said, “I know it’s none of mine— ”

“No,” said Morse. He was staring fixedly at his shoes as they scuffed against the ground. “It’s not.”

Thursday had known— well, he’d known Morse hadn’t been right since Blenheim Vale, of course. Not right since well before that, Jakes would have said, once, although Jakes had left off that kind of talk. But what he would have meant by it was that Morse didn’t fit in. Wouldn’t fit in, maybe. Had never even tried to. And Thursday had known that for all his cleverness, Morse could be blindingly, shockingly stupid, once in a while. But he hadn’t known— this.

That Morse had a weakness, though, that was no secret. Hadn’t taken long for Thursday to learn what to look out for, when the lad was getting his heart tangled up along with his head. Easy enough to keep an eye. A pretty face, a sweep of hair, a particular kind of loneliness behind the eyes: enough to set off alarm bells. Well— wasn’t this just another case of the same, more or less? Only Thursday hadn’t been around to notice. Hadn’t been around to keep the boy in line.

Thursday caught his own train of thought, now and again. Christ, Morse was a grown man, wasn’t he? Looked young for it, perhaps. Could behave it, too, usually when you least expected it. When Thursday was his age, he’d already been through hell and back. Put the war behind him. Married, with Joan and Sam already under his feet. But then again— didn’t mean he wasn’t just a lad then, too. Not that he’d have thought so, but looking back. Different time, wasn’t it. Had to grow up fast. Or think that you had.

Thursday had plenty of them to worry over at the station, of course: part of the job. Made sure they were knuckling down, keeping their heads straight. Only with Morse, the way he carried him around in the back of his mind, caught himself fretting— “You sound like you’re talking about our Sam,” Win had said, once, not long after Morse had come back from County last year, skin and bone and on a permanent hair trigger; although Morse wasn’t that much like Sam at all. Sam with a joke for an answer to everything; his new mates down the pub, and out til all hours with them; a dutiful kiss on his mother’s cheek on his way out of the door of a morning. Still the same easy smile he’d had since he was a tiny thing. No, different things to worry about. But Thursday supposed he knew what she’d meant, all the same. The same gut-deep knowledge that the lad was his concern.

More like fretting over Joan, really, though. Sharp as a tack, and a little too stubborn for his own good: well, that was familiar enough. But once you were clever enough to know plenty, it was a hop and a skip to thinking you knew it all. And that was where the trouble started. Was what could get you taken advantage of.

Well, Thursday thought, glancing at Morse sloping along beside him, maybe somebody ought to worry. Since his father— it wasn’t as if the lad had anybody else to look to him.

It’d been dark, in the garden, even with the lanterns lit. Thursday had been awake a good long while. Could be there’d been nothing to see. Could be Morse was just leaving.

Maybe Morse felt Thursday’s eyes on him; whatever it was, he looked up. His eyes were bright with something. Like walking on a knife edge with this one, more often than. Never knew which way it was going to go. Sometimes that thick wall of silence, but sometimes fists out, chin up.

It burst out of Morse all of a sudden: “Nothing _happened_.” Agitated, defensive; but there was a bitter little anger in it, too. A challenge to Thursday to finish the second half of that sentence for himself. _But it could have done. But I would have liked it to._

Thursday wondered what Morse expected him to say next. The lad was flushed with indignation and embarrassment, but his jaw was set, and he didn’t look away.

“That’s neither here nor there,” Thursday said, in the end. “None of mine, like you said. But I’ll tell you what my business is, and that’s you, Morse. Anything happens to you, and I’m answerable for it.”

No response to that at first, but then, half-mumbled: “Not at the moment, you’re not.”

“Haven’t put in your papers, yet,” Thursday reminded him. “So I can’t have you putting yourself in unnecessary danger.”

“Danger?” said Morse, faintly incredulous. “You want me to come back to work, but you also think I should stay out of _danger_?”

“I said unnecessary danger. Don’t be a bloody fool.”

“I find it hard to believe,” said Morse, and there was that hard edge to his voice that Thursday only heard when he was really irritated, “that if you’d turned up to find me walking into gunfire— ”

“You’d be getting exactly the same dressing down, and you know it.”

That shut him up for the moment. Copper these past five years, and army before that: Morse knew well and good what trouble looked like. Thursday had seen more than enough of it himself. The grey faces pinched with unhappiness, the scattered dignity. A caution if you were lucky. And, oh, worse. Young lads with their heads kicked in. He’d seen Morse take enough on the chin, but— Christ. Set his teeth on edge, set his tired brain turning over uselessly.

There was a part of him that couldn’t help but wonder if this wasn’t all part of Morse— well, acting out, after everything that had happened. Weight of the world, even more so than usual; angry at the injustice of it all, and left to his own devices. Natural for him to be testing the limits. His own. Thursday’s, maybe. Not that Morse could have expected him to turn up tonight a second time. And besides, Thursday had enough experience of Morse seeing what he could get away with. Turned lippy, bolshy, usually, when he thought he’d been hard done by. But when he got like this— the long silences, the grey moods, lost inside his own head— it wasn’t quite the same. Didn’t seem to be for anyone else’s benefit.

Thursday was beginning to feel the cold in his bones, despite the walk. Tiredness too, though, he supposed. Long night catching up with him. Familiar, at least, the two of them near dead on their feet, chasing the dawn, Morse’s quietness heavy by his side. That was something.

“It’s not right, you know,” Morse said, eventually. The spikiness, the pique, all seemed to have drained out of him too, somewhere in the last few footsteps.

“Beg pardon?”

“Not right that that should be dangerous. Just talking to somebody.”

 _Didn’t look like you were just talking_ , Thursday didn’t say. “Not our place to decide that,” he said, instead. “Ours not to reason why.”

“Really?” Morse’s voice was soft in the dark. “Isn’t that exactly our place? To speak up if something isn’t right?”

“Sometimes, maybe. Sometimes to stay quiet, if it’s needed.”

Another silence, but Morse seemed to have taken that one in the spirit it was intended.

“Knew you were a copper, did he?” Thursday asked, almost conversationally.

“Mm.” Morse was staring ahead of them now, shoulders held stiff against the chill coming off the water. He didn’t say, as Thursday had thought he might, _I’m not at the moment_. “But an unusual sort of one, I suppose.”

“I’ll say.”

They were coming up on the little lake house now, in the distance. A squat black shape against the water, where the trees thinned out. Thursday had never been fussy about where he put his head down, but all the same, he couldn’t imagine wanting to spend more than a few days out here. Draughty, surely. All alone in the middle of bloody nowhere. Well— peaceful, he supposed.

“I’ve seen you do this before, you know,” Thursday said. He felt Morse tense beside him, head swinging back round, the frown written across his face. “I don’t mean— ” Thursday started to clarify, but then didn’t. No need to name it. (Although, some quiet part of his brain whispered, _isn't_ that what you mean? Keeping an eye out for the lad, you must have noticed. Men looking at Morse, sometimes; well, no surprise there, a good-looking boy like him, and with that fractious air around him of— difference. But what about Morse, just now and again, looking back?)

“I mean,” Thursday said, “I’ve seen you— get yourself lost, when you’re trying to help someone. Someone asks you for an inch, or perhaps they don’t even ask, and you give them a mile and a half. Give them too much of yourself. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having a liking for another body, but…”

Thursday stopped again. But what? But Morse got a liking for the wrong people? The lad could certainly pick them. Or: if Morse went on like this, carrying his heart around on his sleeve, so open for the taking, soon enough he’d have none of it left? Thursday wondered if that were true. Seemed Morse had an awful lot of heart to give. Funny that so many seemed to think the opposite. Couldn’t see it, somehow, bursting to get out of him. As if that big brain of his took up all the space.

He’d wondered sometimes if Morse did this on purpose, in his way. Used that nose for trouble to find his way to disaster before it could find its way to him. Put himself through the wringer, over and over, as if a little happiness was too much even to try for. The nurse had been good news, Thursday had thought. A spark of something in her. Pull the lad out of himself. But then, what did he know? He’d thought— well, Morse and Joan, he’d thought, once. But seemed that was another one that had finished before it had even begun.

“It’s a pattern,” Thursday said, at last. “You’re the one who should be able to see that. Can’t tell me I should be ignoring a pattern.”

Morse had gone tight-lipped again, his silence strung through with that awkwardness that came off him in waves when he desperately wanted to escape from a conversation. Lucky for him, they’d all but reached the lake house, now: the grass led off the road from here down to the shore, where the water was lapping gently in the dark, and the little wooden cabin looked cold and grey and empty.

Thursday said, “I’m only asking you to keep it screwed on, all right?”

“Sir,” said Morse, his voice entirely blank.

“Oh, don’t give me that, Morse.” Silence, again. Morse’s face was shuttered, his eyes down, waiting to be dismissed. “ _Endeavour_.”

Felt strange enough in his mouth, but it did the job. Morse straightened up, surprised into attention. Not that Thursday should have expected anything less. _Joan Ellen Thursday, you apologise to your mother immediately._

There was an air of something a little like defeat about Morse, but he looked Thursday in the eye and said, “Yes. All right.”

Enough, Thursday thought. Enough for one night.

Morse chewed for a moment on his lip, and Thursday thought perhaps he was considering asking him in for a drink. They’d sat up later. But in the end, he said, “Jeannie Hearne— there’s one other thing.”

There: case closed. But Thursday would take this in the spirit it was offered, too. “What’s that?”

“Something I heard tonight. Someone who was at the party— his name is Bruce, Bruce Belborough. His wife said he had a mistress in town. A bus conductress.”

“And you think— ”

“Could be nothing,” Morse said.

“You know where I can find him?”

“They live on the other side of the lake. You wouldn’t miss it.”

“All right. Well.” Thursday tipped his head in the direction they’d come, towards Bixby’s house, and his own waiting car. “Best be getting back.”

Morse nodded.

“Mind how you go, then.”

Another nod; and a kind of grimace that came out of Morse, sometimes, when Thursday thought he might be aiming for a smile.

Thursday turned and walked away. Behind him, soon enough, he heard the creak of the cabin door opening, and the soft sound of it shutting. Then nothing, only the noise of the night around him: the wind rustling the trees, his own footsteps, the beginnings of the dawn chorus. But when he turned and looked back, the weak, yellow light of a lamp was spilling out of the cabin windows, faint and quivering on the water— and then, fainter still, there was music.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this story, you can also reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/171432280237/tacet-equestrianstatue-endeavour-tv-archive)!


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